


To Sun and Stars

by CaptainConfused



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Fluff, Gift Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 16:58:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14815274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainConfused/pseuds/CaptainConfused
Summary: (Rated T just for swearing!)Hermann's PoV. A three-stage look at significant moments in his relationship with Newt, starting with the Good, Old-Fashioned Pining. Final stage is set post-Uprising and is tied to what happens in "From Ash and Dust," so it might help to read that one first.This is another gift fic for tumblr user savagepiss who has all the best Pacific Rim head-canons and once tried to eat ice cream straight off the floor of a crowded ice cream parlor (bless you, friend, you're beautiful, please never change).Also (as before!) I'm writing Ace!Hermann until the day I diiiiiiie.





	To Sun and Stars

**I.**

Hermann stood beneath the flickering fluorescent lights of a Hong Kong convenience store, staring at the shelves of energy drinks, struggling to remember how many empty cans he'd seen littering the space beneath Newton's desk.

Nine.

No—ten. One can hid, half-crushed, behind the computer monitor, visible only as a sliver of tinted aluminum.

Newton purchased them by the dozen.

Which meant he would be out of them by morning.

Which meant buying a set tonight would save Newton a trip tomorrow.

Fiercely annoyed at this unfamiliar pulse of thoughtfulness, Hermann closed his eyes and drew in a deep, steadying breath through his nose. He was here for a _newspaper_ , not candy-flavored caffeine.

Hermann couldn't carry twelve cans, but he could buy a few, just enough to last through a day or two. He could leave them on Newton's desk, tucked out of sight as if Newton had purchased them himself and then forgotten about them.

Hermann tightened his already-iron grip on his cane and stabbed the heel of it against the tiles. “Don't be daft,” he hissed, hardly audible over the rain rattling against the pavement outside. Newton didn't _need_ more energy drinks; he needed sleep—real sleep—and to stop trying to pull all-nighters like an irresponsible college student. He needed, like Hermann, a respite from the churning, choking stress of too little time, too little money, too little information in the face of a fight far too big for any of them to win alone.

But what bothered him, he knew, encompassed more than just a sudden thought of Newton at the sight of some stupid energy drinks.

Memories flickered, all of them unbidden, all of them unwanted:

Newton stumbling over to Hermann's desk with his sleeves unrolling and his gloved hands covered in Kaiju fluids, begging “Hermann, Hermann, don't make that face, just fix my sleeves, come on, please.”

Hermann fighting a sigh at the unbearable volume of Newton's music and Newt, without comment, turning the dial back a few notches until the bass stopped reverberating in Hermann's chest.

Newton strolling past Hermann's chalkboard and casually picking up a piece of dropped chalk to replace it on the ledge.

“Hey, wait, wait, Hermann, your hair—you have a thing—hold still—got it,” and the brush of a hand, precise and careful and feather-light, against his temple.

Hermann turning in his chair to find a chipped mug of water or coffee placed well away from his papers and books, the mug's twin cupped in Newton's hands as he puzzled over something on the other side of the room.

“Just let me-- God, Hermann, stand underthe _stupid_ umbrella, dude, it's not hard.”

And, just this morning, Newt sailing into the laboratory with the top three buttons of his shirt misaligned and Hermann finally so exasperated that he _had_ to fix them and Newt full of squawking annoyance even as he caught Hermann's elbow to keep him balanced in lieu of his cane.

All of Newton's thoughtlessly kind gestures, all the unexpected sparks of generosity blindingly bright against the backdrop of Newt's frustrating arrogance and stubbornness and recklessness.

Hermann rubbed his elbow, tried to erase the lingering shadow of Newt's grasp. No one wanted to be close—not to him. No one saw in him something seeking kindness or generosity or warmth of any sort. No one thought, with him in mind, of small gestures.

But Newton wanted to be loud, and he wanted to be sensational, and small gestures meant nothing to someone who was by nature so dramatic. Small gestures from Newton were emblematic of a basic human decency, nothing else.

 _So don't be daft,_ Hermann insisted again, silently this time. Thunder rumbled behind him like a distant growl, and Hermann hitched up the hood of his parka. _You fool._ _It's just you._

He fully expected, when he returned to the lab before sunrise, to find Newton collapsed at his desk, more unconscious than asleep, his glasses askew and, by this point, permanently bent out of shape. How a man could be so brilliant and yet also so brilliantly stupid had once been beyond Hermann, but as he bought five of the neon-bright cans, stuffing them into a plastic grocery bag along with the newspaper he'd originally come in for, Hermann knew his own idiocy to be of a different sort, but one no less damning.

 

 

 

**II.**

Cries of _We won! It's over! We're alive!_ crowded the Hong Kong streets, as loud tonight as they had been for the last two weeks, and the joy and relief and crackling hope in every raised voice brightened the streets to blinding. The reek of alcohol mixed with the steam of vendors' street food mixed with air as dense and warm as bathwater.

Between the fireworks and the crush of bodies and the cacophony of shouting and singing, only Newt's blazing enthusiasm kept Hermann from crawling into an abandoned Anti-Kaiju shelter to wait for the celebrations to end.

“They had the exact same DNA and that-- that was the key, right? They were clones—like, like lab-grown, right?” Beside him, Newt had shoved his sleeves past his elbows and was dissecting the Kaiju tattoo on his arm with a ballpoint pen. Temporary ink crisscrossed over permanent; a forgotten bowl of curry fish balls remained loosely cupped in his left hand. “Their blood is _absolutely_ toxic, right, and the skull plate—like, across this whole region—is too thick to cut through before the brain rots-- I mean before the _primary_ brain rots--”

The handful of onlookers watched and listened, entranced by this spontaneous lecture on alien biology, and Hermann swallowed his discomfort, settled into the sensation of Newt's shoulder jammed against his, Newt's weight half on Hermann and half on the pedestrian barrier behind them.

“--and there's so much ammonia in their brains that they're a _bitch_ to get a hold of, and if you look at the shape of the skull on-- on-- on _this_ asshole--”

Newt twisted his arm, skating his pen up from the inside of his elbow, and Hermann (for the second time in as many minutes) reached over and caught his wrist and gently tilted his arm back into its first position to keep the _gaa lei yu dan_ from tipping out of the bowl. Newton, either drunk or so overstimulated that the result was the same, didn't notice, and went back to drawing on the inside of his arm, his English sliding into Mandarin, then German in a chaotic, overexcited mix of languages.

Hermann would never tell anyone, not even Newt, but _this_ Newton, loud and ricocheting and bubbling over with inarticulate brilliance was his favorite. This was Newton when he wasn't brittle with too much stress, too little rest, too little food. For too many years, they'd both held themselves together with caffeine or Aspirin or a few stolen hours of sleep, and Hermann didn't realize just how tightly-wound they'd been until the wires were cut.

The whole world sighed in relief, the weight sloughed off the shoulders of the Shatterdome's occupants, and this was Dr. Newton Geiszler—as bright as a new sun and loose and loud enough for at least three people.

“Wait-- wait-- no. It's this one, this one's the closest—so _this_ skull plate--”

“But,” one of the onlookers began, plainly hoping to guide Newton back to his original point, “What did you need _any_ of their brains for?”

“Because,” Hermann began before Newt had a chance to reply, “he had a completely hare-brained scheme that had an astronomically small chance of not killing him instantly.”

“Yeah, basically,” Newt agreed, “and it worked and it was great-- but to get back to the, uh, to the _brain chemistry--_ ” And he twisted his arm again, hard enough this time that Hermann's light grip did nothing to stop him, and the bowl's contents tumbled out of the Styrofoam to bounce onto the pavement underfoot. He blinked, apparently startled to find anything in his hand, and watched one of the fish balls roll down the sidewalk and disappear beneath the feet of the milling crowd.

Hermann gently pried the bowl from Newt's slack grip, twisting to drop it into the bin on the other side of the barrier. “Don't worry about them, Newton,” he insisted in the face of his partner's fixed stare. “Just leave them.”

Newt wavered. From the incredible delay between processing what had happened and reacting to it, Hermann supposed he _was_ drunk, rather than just wound up by the overwhelming pulse of activity around them.

“Leave them,” he insisted again, more firmly this time. “We can buy another.”

But Newt dropped into a crouch so fast that Hermann stumbled, immediately off-balance without Newt propped against him. He canted forward and caught himself with a hand on the back of Newt's shoulder, and barely managed to avoid stabbing his cane into Newt's foot.

“Newton, what--”

“I can't just leave it, dude.” Newt picked up one of the curry fish balls that had hitched up against the edge of his shoe. “We paid for these.”

“It's dirty, put it down.”

“Five-second rule.”

“No. Newt-- _No_.” But Newt was already lifting the ball to his mouth, and Hermann realized with a pulse of horror that Newt really did intend to eat what he had just picked off the concrete.

Quick reflexes were not usually his forte, but Hermann rocked forward and snatched the fish ball out of Newt's hand and—with a flick of his wrist—threw it into the garbage before Newt could snatch it back. Off-balance, he stumbled again and sort-of-not-quite crashed into Newton, who somehow managed not to tip forward onto the concrete.

As Newt opened and closed his hand, perplexed by its emptiness, a couple of the impromptu-lecture attendees stepped forward to help the pair of them to their feet. Tense already at the prospect of their hands on him, Hermann shooed them away with a look, and they dispersed back into the swell of the crowd.

Newt, finally, wobbled back onto his feet and twisted until he could wedge his shoulder under the hollow of Newt's arm. “I wasn't-- I _was_ going to eat it, dude,” he muttered, looping an arm around Hermann's waist. “Or did-- did you want it?”

“No, Newton, I do not want anything you've picked up off the sidewalk”

“I didn't want to waste it.”

“You _twit_. We survive years of apocalyptic hell and you come _this close_ to death by food poisoning.”

“I've eaten worse.”

“You overgrown child.” What an easy habit, to slip into the same partially-affectionate, mostly-aggravated tone he'd been using for years. “You absolute idiot.”

“Fascist,” Newton countered, likewise without rancor. Without waiting for a rejoinder, he tightened his hold around Hermann's waist and dragged him stumbling down the sidewalk, and Hermann—very carefully, overly-conscious of the fall of his hand on the fabric of Newton's shirt—settled an arm around his partner's shoulders. Together they hobbled down the sidewalk, a stumbling, staggering four-legged animal, half-wounded, half-drunk, entirely off-balance.

“Anyway,” Newt began, brandishing his still-held pen at nothing, “We had to just like _stab_ through the skull plate to get to the-- to the brain—the first brain—right?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Do you remember?”

“Yes, Newton.” This enthusiasm—he was the only audience for it now, and Newt's crackling brightness was, for this sliver of time, a solar storm just for him. Hermann closed his eyes just for a second and let his next step tip him more heavily against Newt's shoulder. “I remember.”

“Right. And the-- the baby's skull hadn't fused yet, so we could-- we could-- we could get the needle in there.”

“This is a questionable post-dinner conversation.”

Newt met that with a noise that was very close to being a petulant whine, but he did fall silent. For about twelve seconds—and then he stabbed his ballpoint pen into the air in a gesture that nearly gouged a passerby in the arm. “We saved the world, Hermann!”

“Well, we _helped_.” Hermann tugged on Newt's shoulder to steer him away from the edge of the sidewalk. “I think there was a team effort in--”

“ _We saved the world, Hermann._ We were _amazing. You_ were amazing. We're like _spies_ now.”

“Ah.” Even if Newton's claims were factually untrue, Hermann let the sentiment wash through him. Two weeks had passed since their Drift, but some instincts lingered: to bend instead of bristle; to tilt the prism of his thoughts to see the angle of Newt's interpretation; to let Newt unravel the hyperactive workings of his own brain instead of trying to cut them into shorter, more manageable strands.

Letting Newton insist they were spies was, here and now, an easy accommodation.

Newt had certainly taken the idea in stride: “Think of all the _insane and cool_ missions we'll get to do now, Hermann, my man. James Bond shit. Like we'd be trapped in a room with bad guys, right? And I would look at you with, like, _this look_ —you have to look at me or this doesn't work—right, so _this look_ , and that's _your_ cue to smack 'em in the knee with your cane. Okay? Okay, remember that.”

As Newt stumbled and dug his fingers into Hermann's shirt to keep himself upright, surprise and a dizzying affection pulsed through Hermann's chest.How impossible this still was, this shared state of always touching or almost touching—together and apart, orbiting each other with a focus and intent two-weeks old but years overdue. A tiny, private universe of two amidst the wider scatter of stars.

Would this last? Would this sense of closeness and deliberate care and the sense of another person at last at last being _home_ carry past the fizz of the city's celebrations?

 _Yes_. If Hermann could help it, then absolutely yes, this would last. For all his raucous music and threadbare grasp on personal hygiene, Newt had threaded himself into the fabric of Hermann's life, and the last thing Hermann wanted was to pull him loose.

“Are you remembering that, Hermann? You have to remember it because we're going to need it.”

“Hmm.” Hermann steered Newt, again, away from the edge of the sidewalk. The crowd around them had thinned and they had wandered into a shaded walkway less than a city park but still more settling than the steel and cement and neon. “And are these 'bad guys' going to be armed?”

“Oh, heck yeah. They always are, my man.” Newt turned toward him, miming a pistol with his free hand. “Guns—like in the movies.”

“In that case, Newton, I think I'm mostly—in this scenario—going to be preventing you from being shot.”

“Or I'll be stopping them from shooting _you_. Maybe that. Think of _that_.”

“Ah, yes. You'll be my knight in rumpled jeans.”

Newt laughed, more exhale than sound, and Hermann felt his breath on his mouth, all humid warmth and alcohol, and realized just how close Newt's face was to his own. He managed not to flinch, but he must have stilled or tensed or otherwise given himself away: Newton tilted his head back to study Hermann from a distance of more than three inches.

“How close is too close?” Even if Newt's voice was still chipper, there was an earnest edge to it, a softness to it, and Hermann averted his gaze—tried to catch a glimpse of fireworks between the trees rather than meet such bright green eyes.

He had spent, several years ago, a week in Rennes for a conference. He hadn't known more than three phrases in French, and the entire week had been a complicated muddle of half-translations, bewildering idioms, and the sense of being so far out of his linguistic depth that at any moment he might lose his hair-thin thread of understanding and drown, drown, drown.

This, too, was a language he didn't understand but was scrambling to learn. Newt, painfully so, seemed effortlessly fluent, and Hermann didn't want him to know that he was struggling to keep his head above water.

“You're not too close,” he replied, though he knew his voice was stiff and formal and Newton would not believe him. “Truly.”

“I've been in your mind, remember? I know what you _don't_ want. The rest is fuzzy-ish.”

 _I know what you_ don't _want._ The promise, unspoken: _I won't push_. But Hermann didn't know how to speak this way, didn't know how to admit to this illiteracy, didn't know what to do with a Newton Geiszler so uncharacteristically quiet and careful and focused.

So Hermann kept his gaze on the treeline, not on Newt's eyes and especially not on his mouth. “You're not too close, Newton,” he insisted again, more softly this time. “But you did drink too much.”

“Did I? I don't even remember what I had.” But Hermann's answer must have satisfied, as Newt swung one foot forward in an exaggerated step. Hermann allowed himself to be drawn into another stumbling stroll.

Even having seen a glimpse of his brain, Hermann might never understand the full, endlessly-complicated shape of Dr. Newton Geiszler. This disheveled mess of a man who looked like he hadn't changed his shirt since he was a teenager but had been the second-youngest student ever admitted to MIT and had earned six doctorates by the time he was twenty-five. And had also, not twenty minutes ago, tried to put in his mouth something he had picked up from the sidewalk of one of the most heavily-populated cities on Earth.

“You're a natural disaster, Newton.”

“Oh?” Newt took another comically long step to avoid a crack in the sidewalk. “That's a new one. What kind?”

“All of them.”

Newt laughed at that—a sharp _Ha!—_ and Hermann bit back an indulgent smile. He had to resist the urge to close his eyes again, to imprint the shape of the evening on his mind's eye: city air heavy and warm and full of food-smoke, the still-unexpected privilege of Newt warm and clumsy and undemanding beside him, the night condensed in one slow second of hope and relief and peace enough to finally breathe.

“I don't want to be a-- a-- a blizzard, though, Hermann. I'll be-- I'll be-- Oh!” Newt swayed to a stop, tightened his arm around Hermann's waist to keep him steady. “What time is it?”

“Late. Did we finally run your batteries down?”

Newt didn't answer and instead fumbled for his pocket. He managed to reach inside on his third try and pulled out his cracked, scuffed cellphone. The screen lit up at a touch and **1:47** blazed across the lock screen.

“Oh! Good! That's just in time for a good morning one.”

Hermann's sense of peace immediately vanished. “Newton,” he began, careful and soothing, trying to talk as if to a child holding a lit match, “you don't need to do that.”

“Don't answer your phone.”

“This is the second time this week.”

“Don't answer it,” Newt insisted, pulling up his only saved contact.

Hermann drew in a deep breath, but the phone in his pocket was already ringing. He listened, flushed with preemptive embarrassment, as the phone rang and rang and finally clicked into voicemail.

 _Hello._ His own voice, tinny and distorted, issued from Newt's phone. _This is Dr. Gott--_

“HERMANN.” Newt didn't even wait for the recording's _beep_. “HELLO. GOOD MORNING. You'll get this in the morning.”

“Newton--”

“I think you're REALLY GREAT.” His voice high and off-key and not quite lilting enough to be musical, Newt snaked his arm away from Hermann's waist, hooked it around his shoulders instead. “Better than... better than....”

Hermann pressed his free hand over his eyes. “Better than what, Newton?”

“Bread.”

“Ah.”

“No, better than _butter_ on bread. There's butter on the bread. That's what you're butter than-- _better_ than.”

Burning with embarrassment, Hermann wanted in equal measure to dissolve into the pavement and to take Newt's face in his hands with a whispered _Newton, please, what are you doing, we're in public._ And yet, more deeply rooted than even the embarrassment, in the pit of his stomach nested the absolute truth that Hermann would be listening to this mess of a voicemail over breakfast, would be saving it along with its three predecessors onto his computer to preserve them indefinitely.

Deeply rooted, too, was the sense that standing here in the semi-darkness with Newt hanging off his shoulder and dissembling into his scuffed excuse for a phone (“Why is butter so good on bread?”) reconciled an equation that had taken years to solve—an equation that had begun all those years ago when letters from a brilliant peer left in Hermann an unfamiliar glow and swirled his thoughts into a whirl of hope and interest and fascination.

 _You love him_. Memories of the Drift—Newton's memories, thoughts, impressions, hopes, all of them as precious now as his own—bubbled to the surface. _And he loves you, too._

 

**III.**

Clouds stretched from horizon to horizon in a single, unbroken sheet of washed-out gray. Hermann could hear the patter of falling rain against the windows, but the sound ran soft, more soothing than unsettling.

Some might call his apartment austere, but Hermann found in it all the constituent pieces of a place turned home: books arranged in alphabetical order, except for the one currently open on his lap; framed photographs hung in precise lines; a box of old, much-unfolded letters in a box on the mantel; and—of course, at last—Newton Geizsler.

A Newton sickly pale with heavy shadows beneath his eyes, but Newton nonetheless. A Newton finally, if fitfully, asleep for the first time since his release from the custody of the PPDC.

Beside him, Newt mumbled something muted and unintelligible, curled himself more tightly beneath Hermann's borrowed parka. The top of his head nudged Hermann's knee, and Hermann rested a hand on the shoulder of his own coat, waited for Newt's breathing to settle, for sleep to smooth out the fidgeting in his hands.

But as Newt shifted again and as his breath hitched in the start of a gasp, Hermann set aside his book altogether and gave Newt's shoulder a gentle shake. “Newton,” he whispered. Then, more urgently, “Newton, wake up.”

Newt twisted beneath the parka, the fingers of one hand curled iron-tight around the wrist of the other. His voice rose from a mutter to something audible: “I won't. I won't. I _won't_.”

“Newton. _Newton_.”

Newt's fingernails dug into his own wrist and he sat up with a jerk and a wordless shout, and even as Hermann's hand fell from the parka, he was reaching for his partner again, a hand steady against Newt's chest, palm flat against his racing heart.

“Here, Newt.” Hermann pressed—gently, gently—against the rumpled fabric of Newt's shirt, felt against his fingertips the hard plane of Newt's sternum. “We're right here. You're alright.”

For a moment, Newt's gaze was frantic and faraway, his mind stuck in whatever nightmare he'd vaulted out of. And then he blinked—and his eyes refocused—and his breathing lost its ragged edges. Without his glasses, he looked lost and fragile—a look that faded only partially as Newt blinked again and sagged against the sofa.

“Sorry,” he muttered, as Hermann withdrew his hand. “What was that, like twenty minutes?”

“Not quite an hour. How do you feel?”

“Like I didn't sleep at all.”

Not for the first time, Hermann wished fiercely and in vain for another chance to Drift with Newton, regardless of what he might find. He could remember, too well, the crushing strangeness of an alien pressing down against his consciousness, trying to crush his thoughts and memories into dust and debris. Newt had been there, too, of course—a bolstering presence against the Precursors, his only shield against the gaping, whirling hell of an alien world—but even with him, Hermann had felt so fragile. So small. So easily swept away and snuffed out.

That was, perhaps, a sliver of how Newton felt. Newton had spent the last ten years strung-out and alone, facing a different sort of stress from life in the Shatterdome, and Hermann wanted desperately to know what he felt, to help him carry that weight.

In the wake of Hermann's silence, Newt slid sideways to prop himself against Hermann's shoulder. He said nothing, just reached for Hermann's wrist, and Hermann held absolutely still as Newt took his hand and folded it around his own. Tentative and careful, as if he didn't trust his hands, Newt exerted no pressure, simply ran his thumb back and forth, back and forth along the ridges of Hermann's knuckles.

Newt had always been casual with his personal space, but this near-constant contact – Newt propping his forehead against Hermann's shoulder, Newt pushing his shoulder or knee against Hermann's whenever they sat together, Newt's fingers seeking Herman's elbow then wrist then hand – felt deliberate, felt like Newt desperate for some constant tether that would keep him from drifting too far out to sea.

Hermann curled his hand more tightly around Newt's. “You're a good man, Newton,” he whispered and, when Newt huffed in disbelief, added, “You are.”

Newt shook his head and the ends of his riotously-messy hair tickled Hermann's cheek. “I'll just not sleep ever again,” he announced, his voice thin and quiet. “It'll be fine.”

“Hmm. That can be our secondary plan.”

“No, it's the first plan. The only plan. All other plans are dumb.”

Hermann did not dignify that with a response. With his free hand (and somewhat awkwardly, given the angle), he tried, without any success, to smooth down Newt's hair. He'd never be able to properly tidy it without a comb, of course, but he brushed his fingers through it anyway. Newton tilted his head and closed his eyes, and Hermann tried to figure out which direction, if any, was the natural direction of Newt's disheveled and uneven fringe.

For a long while, Newton said nothing, and Hermann would have thought him asleep again if he hadn't felt the tension in the fingers threaded with his. But he shifted at last, just to settle more comfortably against Hermann, and said, quite softly, “This is you yelling.”

“I haven't said anything, Newton.”

“Not that kind of yelling, dude. Just, like... I dunno.” Newt trailed into silence, fidgeting now with Hermann's fingers as he lapsed into thought. “Like... it's not loud. How you show you care. That's what I think-- what I think I didn't know. Because _I_ was loud about it. I didn't... get it, I guess. That just because you weren't yelling didn't mean you didn't... you didn't want me around anymore.”

Hermann's thoughts flickered back to that night, so many years ago now, when he'd stood just out of reach of the rain in a Hong Kong convenience store and glowered at the rows and rows of energy drinks. The small things—the quiet things—on one side, and Newt's loud, rock-star grandiosity on the other.

“I'm not a loud person, Newton.”

“No, dude, I know. You don't need to be. I don't want that. I'm... better at listening now. Or better at _not_ listening, maybe. I mean, I knew _all_ that. All that about how you... how you felt about me. I _saw_ it, I was  _in_ your head. But that dumb voice saying none of that was true was louder than the voice saying it was.”

Hermann touched the back of Newt's neck, tilted his head to nest a kiss in his hair. “The Precursors won't come back,” he promised. “Not to you.”

“Yeah?” Newt's voice went thin and quiet, almost wary. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because the only way they're getting to you is through the Drift, and you're not going into _that_ again without me.” He left another kiss against Newt's hair, but closed his eyes this time, stayed close enough to Newton to breathe in the laundry-and-shampoo smell of him. “Keeping you out of trouble can't be any harder than saving the world, surely.”

Newt laughed—a hoarse sound, a shadow of what it had been before—but still it was the best thing Hermann had heard in days. “Are you sure?” he asked, and the uneasiness was gone from his voice, at least for now. “I can do some pretty stupid shit, Hermann.”

“Yes. _Pretty stupid shit_ is an elegant way of putting it.”

“Yeah, like, if you don't keep an eye on me, who knows what kind of garbage I might try to pick up off the street and put in my mouth.”

Hermann opened his eyes and leaned back far enough to look at Newt properly. Newton might still have been gray and glassy-eyed, and his brazen self-confidence might never come back, not entirely, but as Newt twisted sideways to return the inspection, a flash of his old energy sparked just for a moment in his self-satisfied grin.

They would never, really, be able to go back to the firework-evenings and effervescent joy of a post-Breach Hong Kong. They would never be able to go back to those first few days after the Drift, when knowing the other's thoughts had been as automatic as knowing one's own.

But this was the start of something else, something different, something no less precious for all that had come before.

So Hermann rolled his eyes in false exasperation and put a hand over Newt's face, which earned a muffled laugh, and knew he was as certain now as he had been five, ten, fifteen years ago: Newt had threaded himself into the fabric of Hermann's life, was as much a part of it now as Hermann himself, and Hermann would never let him unravel again.

**Author's Note:**

> Newt's drunken serenade song is "Hello I Love You" by Ima Robot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMVnkPQlp-E) -- Thank you savagepiss for this beautiful suggestion; I cry tears of laughter every time.


End file.
